The Blithedale Romance

Miles Coverdale, a minor poet, joins a group of idealists who have founded Blithedale, a farm community near Boston where they hope to build a better society by sharing work and living simply. There he is drawn to three remarkable people: the brilliant, beautiful feminist Zenobia, the fragile, mysterious young Priscilla, and the forceful reformer Hollingsworth, who wants to use the community for his own scheme for reforming criminals. Coverdale watches, half involved, as their relationships tangle towards tragedy.

Nathaniel Hawthorne based the novel, published in 1852, on his own months at the utopian community of Brook Farm in 1841. Read Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables.